EXHIBITION | PERFORMANCES Website :: show.mat.ucsb.edu Friday June 7th 5 PM – 9 PM Media Arts and Technology Program Media . Art . Design . Engineering [at] UCSB California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), UCSB MEDIA ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY <MAT> AT UCSB is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music, digital arts & design research, practice, production, and theory. The program resides both in the UCSB College of Engineering and the Humanities and Fine Arts division of the UCSB College of Letters and Science. > < SHOW.MAT.UCSB.EDU <MAILING ADDRESS> Media Arts and Technology University of California, Santa Barbara ION 3309 Phelps Hall Santa Barbara, California 93106-6065 UCT <LABS AND ALLOSPHERE RESEARCH FACILITY> MATP @ California NanoSystems Institute <INTRODUCTION> University of California Santa Barbara INTROD Elings Hall 2nd and 3d floor *PROGRAM CHAIR* Santa Barbara, California Marko Peljhan MADE [at] UCSB is the Media Arts and Technology Program’s <INSTAGRAM> *CURATOR* (MAT) End of Year Show at the University of California, Santa @mat_ucsb *AI TRACK CURATOR* Barbara. Showcasing graduate student work that connects Fabian Offert media art, design and engineering, MADE [at] UCSB represents <WEBSITE> the mission of MAT: to enable the creation of hybrid work that www.mat.ucsb.edu *FABRICATION TRACK CURATOR* informs both scientific and aesthetic discourses. Mark Hirsch The exhibition features over 50 installations, performances, <EOYS 2019 TEAM> concerts, and technical presentations by artists, scientists, Aaron Anderson and engineers from the MAT community and beyond. A diverse Rodney DuPlessis selection of work spans themes such as virtual reality, robotics, Diarmid Flatley quantum physics, machine learning, electronic music and many Mark Hirsch other transdisciplinary subjects. You-Jin Kim 2 3 Fabian Offert This year, two special tracks present work at the cutting edge < > < > Anshul Pendse of art and engineering: the Artificial Intelligence special track, Gregory Reardon curated by Fabian Offert, investigates the recent intersection Gustavo Alfonso Rincon Jr. Weidi Zhang of machine learning and the arts. The Fabrication special track, curated by Mark Hirsch, features new modes of fabrication with *BROCHURE DESIGN* novel materials and machines. The exhibition also offers the *VISUAL IDENITY* opportunity to tour the AlloSphere: a three story, large-scale, Weidi Zhang audio and visual immersive instrument and laboratory. *BROCHURE EDITING* As a pre-opening event on Thursday, MADE [at] UCSB is proud Gregory Reardon to present a guest lecture by Meredith Hoy (ASU), and a special Fabian Offert panel discussion on The Future of 1994: 25 Years of Second Wave *PRINTING* Media Art, featuring MAT Faculty and invited guests. Opening Tiskarna Januš, Ljubljana remarks will be given by department chair, Professor Marko Peljhan, who is currently representing Slovenia at the 58th *MAT FACULTY* Venice Biennale. Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Prof. George Legrady Prof. Marcos Novak Prof. Marko Peljhan Dr. Curtis Roads Dr. Matthew Turk Dr. Yon Visell *STAFF SUPPORT* Laura Cheung Swapna Madineni Lindsey McKenzie Larry Zins *SPECIAL THANKS* Juan Manuel Escalante Tobias Höllerer Marko Peljhan Media . Art . Design . Engineering [at] UCSB Design . Art . Media . <MARK HIRSCH: EXPERIMENTS IN MATTER> Fabrication - as a concept, practice, and technology - is an inextricable part of the media arts story. The desire for poiesis, for engineered tools to bring novel objects into existence, is a thread that can be traced from moments > < SHOW.MAT.UCSB.EDU like the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) of the mid 20th century to current practices in computational sculpture, 3D printing, soft robotics, and architecture. Today, the ubiquity of digital fabrication endows programs like Media Arts & Technology with as many 3D printers as 2D printers, if not more. While these tools have been Zhu’s fluidic fabric muscle sheets (FFMS) (PenBall) a great boon for the democratization of fabrication for are composite fabric structures that integrate fluidic artists, they also encourage a type of uniformity that transmissions based on arrays of elastic tubes. These inevitably arises from a process monopolized by one sheet-like actuators can strain, squeeze, bend, and system or method - in this case the FDM (fused deposition conform to hard or soft objects of arbitrary shapes or modeling) printer and its associated workflow: CAD sizes, including the human body. modeling followed by layer slicing. FABRICATION TRACK Gustavo A. Rincon Jr.’s work also engages with established What then, in the context of media art, are the trends practices, but in a new light. Etherial - Blue Atom Sculpture breaking this uniformity? In the context of MADE [at] UCSB, utilizes professional fabrication services to render three trends in particular are represented in this body of dynamic forms into single-state structures. work: unconventional materials, methods, and interactions. <INTERACTIONS> <MATERIALS> Digital fabrication is dominated by a conventional workflow Fused plastics have proven their worth in layer-based in which a user designs an object in software, generates deposition for countless iterations of 3D printer design. machine code to control the fabrication process, and waits Through these iterations, the material properties of these for the results of fabrication to complete. MADE [at] UCSB fused plastics have been well characterized and utilized. exhibits work that expands the user-interface paradigm Yet, all materials, to varying extents, dictate the forms that in digital fabrication by augmenting or replacing steps can be created with them - material constraints inform in the conventional workflow with processes that are design constraints. 4 more interactive, collaborative, and conducive to creative 5 practice. < > < > What affordances might unconventional fabrication materials promote in the design process? MADE [at] UCSB Tim Wood’s kinetrope:roots situates the design interface highlights two instances in which new forms are made of digital fabrication in an embodied and interactive possible by unconventional material choice. In Biometric experience. Central to this work is the question: “How Visceral Interface, Mengyu Chen and Jing Yan explore soft does the body’s movement leave traces of life, energy, materials with low moduli to be utilized on the human sustenance in space?” To explore this, Wood creates an body and create wearable devices that interact with the interactive system that connects the body’s movement via skin for the purpose of biometric data visceralization and motion tracking depth camera to a virtual world of growing affective interpersonal communication. They design a soft root like plants. pneumatic choker structure, made from silicon based high performance rubbers, that is worn on the neck. The choker Mark Hirsch takes a different approach to fostering inflates and deflates based on air flow changes. interactive experiences in digital fabrication. The interface In a second example, Mark Hirsch and his collaborators for Sodium Acetate Printing creates an environment that explore rapid, deposition-based 3D printing through is intuitive, responsive, and provides a balance between the use of sodium acetate crystals in Sodium Acetate direct manipulation and abstraction. To do so, the system Printing. Non-toxic and inexpensive, these crystals can employs a familiar sketch-based user-interface capable combine with water to create a supersaturated solution airMorphologies by Yin Yu of abstracting 2D input gestures to 3D features. The rapid that crystallizes immediately upon contact with other crystallization of the sodium acetate allows users to design sodium acetate in its crystallized form. The combination and fabricate simultaneously in a 2D drawing scenario of crystalized bonds and lightweight component materials where input gestures on the tablet are mapped directly allows for the creation of structures, such as unsupported to the build area as well as abstracted to 3D dimensional overhangs, that would be difficult or impossible to achieve parameters such as feature height based. The immediate with conventional deposition-based printing systems. response from the machine to drawn input creates a sketch-based approach to the construction of 3D forms. <METHODS> For creative practitioners, such as designers and artists, the familiarity of drawing makes for an expressive mode Sometimes new approaches to fabrication are brought to explore interactive 3D fabrication in a way that is, as about by reimagining methods of the past. In their Golan Levin puts it, instantly knowable and indefinitely respective practices, Juan Manuel Escalante and Mengjia masterable. Zhu re-contextualize established fabrication methods. Escalante’s Diagrammatics (Making-Of) highlights the way Microsonic Landscapes, created by Juan Manuel Escalante, traditional fabrication methods (in this case carpentry finally reimagines the fabrication workflow by replacing in the wood shop) can situate a modern practice. The the generation of form through a prescribed geometry with diagrams and behind-the-scenes video documenting a mapping of audio data to physical space. This conversion the fabrication process of the exhibition suggests a of sound to space can be traced in the resulting sculptures’ relationship between manual practice and abstract ideas radial form. The first track of each album can be located at